Woodbourne and the Boston 1915 Movement

The planning and construction of the first phase of Woodbourne took place during
a period of time when Boston changed from a bustling, chaotic, industrial 19th
Century city and entered the 20th Century. It was a period when the strong mayor
form of government and professional city planners came into being which would do
so much to shape Boston after the Second World War. Seeds were sown for the
modern City of Boston between 1909 and 1913 by a pioneering - if paternalistic
- effort of a large group of Boston business leaders to transform the way Boston
was governed, planned and developed.

Called the Boston 1915 Movement, it was largely the vision of Edward
Filene, the moving force behind the Boston Dwelling House Company.
Filene and five others formed an executive committee early in 1909 to
address the needs of the new automobile age in Boston. These men were
James Jackson Storrow, Louis D. Brandeis, Bernard Rothwell and George
S. Smith. Filene, one of Boston's most important retail merchants, was
concerned with housing for the working classes. Storrow was an attorney
who specialized in corporate law and managed investment trusts (he
later went on to save and restructure the General Motors Corporation);
Brandeis was an attorney whom President Woodrow Wilson would nominate
as the first Jewish judge on the Supreme Court; Rothwell was President
of the Boston Chamber of Commerce; Smith was a wholesale clothing
merchant and President of the Boston Merchants Association.

Filene and his colleagues held a dinner for 230 of Boston's
business, industrial, financial, educational, religious, and political
leaders on March 30, 1909 at the Boston City Club. The dinner was the
unveiling of the Boston Plan; a "far reaching plan," wrote the Boston Herald the next day," for making the Boston of 1915 the finest in the world."

Fifty years later, another New Boston Plan would be presented by Mayor
John Collins and his recent appointment, the first Director of the new
Boston Redevelopment Authority in 1960. This Plan was created in a
Boston of despair and near bankruptcy; its tax base eroded by migrating
industry to regions with lower wage scales and a vanishing middle class
taking Eisenhower's expressways to the suburbs. The first New Boston
Plan - on the other hand - was announced in a time and spirit of great
optimism at the dawn of a new century. Indeed, it was a celebration of
the end of the 19th Century. The unplanned industrial and
transportation growth and overcrowded, unregulated and unsanitary
housing conditions were choking Boston. Unchecked and uncoordinated
capitalism was threatening to weaken industrial and business growth.
The business community intended through Boston 1915 to put its own
house in order and create an efficient and planned 20th Century Boston
in its own image within five years.

"Your hosts," spoke Mr. Filene in his opening remarks," have asked you here ...
to consult with you. We believe that the growth and welfare of our city can be
immeasurably helped by coordination and planning ahead. We are allowing slum
conditions, a repetition of the old conditions of overcrowded housing to be
recreated even in the outskirts of our city. We must tackle this problem and we
can find a way."

"In the headquarters which will be opened tomorrow morning at 20 Beacon Street
we will call to our aid experts and all the other help needed. [We will] bring
to Boston in addition to what we already have here a knowledge of all the best
things that have been done by any other city in the world and combining all
these best things in a Plan for Boston."

Mr. George Smith said that the mission of the Boston Plan would
be "to bring about mutual understanding and cooperation among the
agencies in existence to the end that they may unite their forces in
support of a common program." The Program proposed was a sixteen point
five-year plan which the executive committee had drawn up and which was
approved by a voice vote at the dinner.

Some of the points included, as quoted in both the Boston Globe and
Boston Herald the next day, were:

First, by 1910, to have an expert accounting of the financial condition and
resources of the city present and prospective.

Second, by 1910, to understand clearly the waste in public resources and
service.

Third, by 1915, to have the best public health department.

Fourth, by 1910, to have made a careful accounting of the human resources of the
city to include the skill level of the workers and the executive abilities of
industrial leaders.

Fifth, by 1910, better working conditions.

Sixth, by 1910, extension of existing industries and introduction of new
enterprises.

Seventh, by 1915, to have a system of public education that actually fits the
boys and girls of Boston for their life work.

Eighth, by 1915, to have well along the execution of an intelligent system of
transportation for the whole state, electric, express, freight and passenger.

Thirteenth, by 1915, to increase the number of branches of the public library.

Fifteenth, by 1912, to have more music in the parks.

Sixteenth, by 1910, a comprehensive system of wage earner insurance and old
age pensions.

Other speakers made additional recommendations for the new Boston of 1915. "We
ought to move all our public schools to the borders of our city parks. There is
no better way in which we can get our children the good of the country... good
pure air and proper outdoor play."

Another floor comment raised one of the most important issues of the Boston 1915
movement, one which led directly to the creation of Woodbourne, that of stricter
building codes." We need to compel builders to allow a decent amount of light
and air in tenements."

But it was the statement of Mr. George W. Codman which admitted the real meaning
behind the Boston 1915 movement." Have we not misconceived the true nature of
our corporate city life? We have tried to run the city as a political
institution and have made a dismal failure at it. We think now that we want a
business administration of our cities with businessmen in command."

And that was exactly what was attempted in the 1909 election for mayor when
James J. Storrow, executive committee member of Boston 1915, ran against John
F. Fitzgerald, who was seeking his second term in office. Before (and after)
Boston 1915 there was the Good Government Association, and both were made up of
the same people: The Associated Board of Trade, the Chamber of Commerce, the
Merchants Association and the Boston Bar Association. The Good Government
Association (GGA) was created in 1903 by Louis D. Brandeis and other business
leaders. Its first president was Lawrence Minot, son of William Minot Jr. who
lived at Woodbourne. (Lawrence Minot, as chief executor of his father's estate,
would sell the property to the Boston Dwelling House Company.)

The GGA was formed mainly in response to the conviction of State Representative
James Michael Curley for fraud in Federal court because he took a civil service
exam impersonating a constituent in 1902. This was the final blow for business
leaders who had watched in horror at the political rise of the Irish Democratic
ward leaders and their art of patronage. Curley was anathema to the business
leaders of the GGA; he represented all that was going wrong in elected city
government. City affairs, in the eyes of these men, were being directed from
Irish Democratic clubhouses in the North End and from Curley's base in Ward 17
in Roxbury. City agencies were being filled with often incompetent political
appointments. What was worse was the increased taxes levied on business
property due to the soaring costs of municipal contracts - particularly in
construction - because of graft and kickbacks. All this caused the GGA to form
and seek ways to correct these problems before commerce and industry moved out
of the city. In this context it is easy to understand why a municipal financial
audit and a study of waste and mismanagement in City affairs were the first two
points of the Boston 1915 agenda.

The election in 1905 of John F. Fitzgerald (grandfather of President John
Fitzgerald Kennedy), political boss of the heavily Irish Catholic Democratic
North End, created panic within the GGA. In 1906, they lobbied through the press
for an investigation into the corruption in the awards of city construction
contracts, for which they held the Mayor personally responsible. Mayor
Fitzgerald - hoping to avoid an investigation damaging to his reputation and
political ambitions - called for an independent Finance Commission to review
city expenditures. This was authorized by the Republican controlled State
legislature in July of 1907. Yet, although the Mayor appointed the seven member
Finance Commission (including the progressive former Mayor Nathan Matthews, who
had always worked well with Irish political leaders), the negative press caused
by the investigation into illegal contracts cost him reelection that year.

The Finance Commission (or FinCom) realized that reforms had failed in the past
because the structure of government remained in the hands of ward leaders whose
power rested with patronage and often graft. The FinCom also felt that the
present form of ward- based city government was pushing property taxes too high
because it depended upon increased city spending on municipal jobs and job
generating capital projects in the wards. The FinCom felt that this was
weakening the industrial and commercial base of the city. The FinCom devised a
new City Charter that would be brought before the voters in November, 1909,
during the first six months of Boston 1915. With the strong backing of Boston
1915 executive committee member, Bernard Rothwell, acting in his capacity as
President of the Boston Chamber of Commerce, the FinCom introduced a strong
mayor charter in order to dilute the locally based (and Irish - controlled) city
government. The Board of Aldermen and Common Council would be abolished and
replaced by a nine member city council elected at large city wide. The powers of
mayor would be strengthened and the term of office extended to four years. (The
new charter, wrote James M. Curley in his 1957 memoirs," was apparently designed
to get rid of me." Just the opposite: Curley took full advantage of the
increased powers of the mayor during his four terms in that office.)

Voters approved of the new charter in November of 1909 by 52%. Ironically,
although the businessmen reformers won control of a weakened city council, they
lost control of the Mayor's office. In a hotly contested race, which can only be
described as a class and ethnic contest, the wealthy Storrow lost to ward boss
Fitzgerald in January, 1910. More people voted than in any other election for
mayor. Fitzgerald would be the first Mayor in Boston to serve for four years.

John F. Fitzgerald saw his victory over James Storrow as a vindication of his
good name. (Decades later, his daughter Rose would equate the 1910 campaign with
the one in which her grandson John waged against Richard Nixon for the
presidency.) In the words of Doris Kearns Goodwin," the Mayor was more secure in
his knowledge that he was indeed equal to the task of governing his city... a
task, ironically, made easier in his second term as a consequence of the
reform legislation he so vigorously opposed. By providing limits to the frenzied
patronage seeking which undermined his first term, the new city charter
protected Fitzgerald from his own vulnerabilities..."

The second Fitzgerald administration worked in harmony with many of the goals of
Boston 1915. His campaign slogan of 1905. "A Bigger, Better, Busier Boston" fit
in perfectly with the optimistic times of the second term. Business leaders
would profit from a bigger and busier Boston, especially now that the ward boss
system had been weakened by the 1909 charter reform law.

"Fitzgerald made it clear", wrote Goodwin, "that he intended to be judged his
second term by one standard alone, his ability to advocate and enact legislation
that would make the life of the average citizen more worth living; measures
that would improve the moral and physical welfare of the people of Boston..."
Words like ' moral' and 'physical welfare' were taken right out of the language
so often heard from the Boston 1915 Movement.

The By Laws of Boston 1915 stated, for example, that it was organized "for the
progress of Greater Boston; to promote by all lawful means the social, material,
moral and intellectual welfare of Greater Boston."

Within the first six months of his second term, Fitzgerald took an action that
encouraged the Boston 1915 reformers: he called for a monthly conference of all
city departments so as to coordinate city services as well as to clarify the
responsibilities of each department. In the fall of 1910, the Mayor appointed
Louis Rourke, who had previously served as a chief engineer on the Panama Canal
project, to the new consolidated office of Board of Public Works. The new Board
combined the street, water and engineering departments into one agency under
one commissioner. This was a "decided first step in municipal efficiency and
economy." cheered New Boston magazine.
"Harmony of action is absolutely essential if the public work of a city is to be
properly prosecuted." The mayor, however, vetoed a city council ordinance passed
in late 1910 which would consolidate the departments of parks, public baths and
music into one Parks and Recreation Department. This didn't go far enough for
the Mayor: he wanted to reorganize the entire system of recreation services to
city residents. The Boston 1915 Movement had an apostle in John F. Fitzgerald.
Like his predecessor Hugh O'Brien, the first Irish mayor of Boston, Fitzgerald
could work with the business leaders of Boston.

II.

Soon after the founding dinner, the Directorate of Boston 1915 was expanded to
include two members who would become trustees of the Boston Dwelling House
Company, the banker Frank Day and the housing social worker Robert A. Woods.
Three other trustees of BDHCo were among those invited to the founding dinner of
Boston 1915, John Wells Farley, Charles H. Jones and James L. Richards.
Richards, director of Boston Consolidated Gas Company, was one of the Filene
Seven who organized the movement. In the spring of 1910, William A Leahy was
added to the executive committee as a representative of the mayor.

The Board of Directors numbered eighty men and women and included Robert Treat
Paine, the dean of philanthropists in Boston who developed the housing for
working men in Jamaica Plain factory district (Paine died on August 11, 1910, so
his participation in Woodbourne can only be speculated), architect Ralph Adams
Cram, and the daughter of the Irish patriot and editor of The Pilot, John Boyle
O'Reilly. Mary Boyle O'Reilly was involved with prison reform and served on the
City Board of Children's Institutions. Other Boston 1915 Board members were
Phillip Cabot of The Improved Housing Association, Ellen Coolidge, of the Boston
Social Union, Meyer Bloomfield also of the Boston Social Union as well as the
Civic Service House, James H. Fahey, publisher of the Republican Boston
Herald and a Director of the Boston Chamber of Commerce and the Reverend
John Hopkins Dennison of the Central Congregational Church on Newbury Street.
The Catholic Charities was represented by its Director, the Rt Reverend Joseph
G. Anderson, the Auxiliary Bishop of Boston and Reverend Maurice J.O' Connor.

The "single aim of the Boston 1915 Plan," as stated in New Boston
magazine, the official organ of the movement, was "to apply the principles of
business organization to a federation of agencies, to focus this combined effort
by setting definite goals for early achievement."

It was the intention of the Directorate from the start to promote the aims of
Boston 1915 through a widely advertised public program that would show what
civic cooperation meant. It was called the "1915 Boston Exposition: a graphic
display of the living and working city... a display of Boston as a going
concern." The term 'exposition' was deliberately chosen because it was inspired
by the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago from May through October,
1893. Indeed, the entire agenda of Boston 1915 was under the enormous influence
of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. At the end of the 20th Century it is difficult
to imagine the magic that the 1893 World's Fair cast over American cities for
the first quarter of this century.

The World's Columbian Exposition was built over 686 acres of lakeshore parkland
to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the New World for Spain
by Christopher Columbus. The fairgrounds were landscaped by Frederick Law
Olmsted and the exposition halls - some of which were huge - were designed by
the greatest living architects and artists of the day. The fair achieved almost
universal acclaim because in the midst of the disorganized industrial city which
sprawled over miles of congested if not squalid housing, serpentine
transportation networks, and inept if not corrupt political machines in city
halls, was a planned metropolis of wide boulevards, parks and waterfronts;
spacious and handsome buildings of uniform massing and proportion, and an
efficient transportation system. It was called "The City Beautiful" and
Woodbourne was part of the solution first introduced in Chicago to create a
beautiful orderly city.

The Chicago World's Fair was the triumph of the city planner; indeed the fair
would make that new term a recognized force in the development of the 20th
Century city. The fair was also the triumph of private investors and business
leaders who largely financed and managed the exposition. (The fair was directed
from an elegant, domed Administration Building in the center of the complex).
This fact was not lost on the reformers who saw the World's Colombian Exposition
as the future of American cities: a planned, rational, coordinated city, uniform
in scale and design and directed from a central office rather than by political
machines but by business leaders. (Not lost either was the fact that the fair
barely made $400,000 in profit from an investment of $28 million. As the
Woodbourne Directors learned, philanthropy does not make money.)

All the buildings at the Exposition were spray painted white which increased
the sense of a unified whole over the vast campus of huge buildings, while
giving it a celestial, futuristic glow which did not fail to impress fairgoers
of the future city to come. The beauty and efficiency of the White City was in
marked contrast to the dull brick and polychrome stone gothic buildings of the
contemporary city and the barking disorder of urban life. (When the four
apartment buildings on Hyde Park Avenue were completed their light color stucco
walls caused the area to be called "White City" because they were the only
buildings southwest of the Boston Elevated Terminal at Forest Hills. The name
still lingers today, but it had far more meaning in 1914.)

The Boston 1915 Exposition opened to the public on November 2, 1909 at the old
Museum of Fine Arts in Copley Square. This building was just the sort of fussy
polychrome stone and brick pile of applied ornament to which the White City
was in contrast. (It would be razed about a year later for the present Copley
Plaza Hotel, completed in 1912). The new Museum of Fine Arts opened that same
month. This elegant temple of art built on clean, classic City Beautiful lines
was just the sort of future that the World's Colombian Exposition promised.
Built of light grey granite, it overlooked the tamed landscaped swamp reborn by
FL Olmsted as the Back Bay Fens.

The Boston Herald called the exposition, "not as much a show as an
awakening. . . hung on the wall where the Valasquez painting once hung is the '
gist of it'," a banner which outlines the platform of Boston 1915.

"It is possible for the willing worker on an average wage to bring up his family
amid healthful and comfortable surroundings. That they may become useful
citizens... Boston 1915 is a City Movement. Cooperation of all people and
organizations for the improvement of Boston; it is a City Plan, which
will put all plans into one general program; it is a City Exposition,
showing year by year the city's progress in its factories, stores, public
departments, homes and health."

Over two hundred exhibits were broken down into three main themes: The Visible
City, Educational, and Social and Economic. City planning, parks, streets and
boulevards and housing were among the exhibits in the Visible City area of the
exposition. "One of the most interesting exhibits," wrote the Boston
Herald on November 2, 1909," is the contrast, actual size, between a model
tenement and an actual 3 bedroom tenement in Boston's North End." Also included
were extensive models and plans for houses of workingmen in England and the
United States. This exhibit would have a direct and immediate influence on the
design and construction of the first phase of Woodbourne.

Other models were the City of Boston "with every building and street correct"
and a $75,000 exhibit of that holy land of the City Beautiful, Chicago. There
was also, as the Herald noted, "much in the exposition that was spectacle, the
Curtiss aeroplane, models of the Wright Brothers aeroplane and wonderful
scientific moving pictures." Not to mention Italian marionettes. The 1893
World's Fair had 14 acres of sideshows and spectacles too.

A key exhibit for Edward Filene was The Catholic Church and Institutions
in a portion of the hall devoted to organized religion in Boston. Filene
recognized that the Catholic Church was on the verge of being a major political
as well as social force in Boston because of the population growth of the Irish
and- most recently - Italian communities. The Irish Catholic was no longer a
subordinate minority and if Boston 1915 was to succeed it needed the support and
the participation of the new Archbishop of Boston, William Henry O'Connell.

On September 30, 1909, Filene wrote to Archbishop O'Connell regarding the
enlargement of the Board of Directors of Boston 1915. He requested a meeting to
discuss" the inception, development and purposes of the Boston 1915 movement."
O'Connell agreed to meet with Filene on Sunday evening October 3, 1909. At that
meeting, the Archbishop delegated Reverends O'Connor and Anderson to help
organize the exposition exhibit on the Catholic Church and its schools. But
O'Connell himself was conspicuously absent (as the press noted) from the special
opening night attended by 4000 people on Saturday evening, October 30,1909.

William Henry O'Connell became Archbishop on August 30, 1907 at the death of
Boston's first Archbishop, John J. Williams. It was an auspicious time for
Boston Catholics which O'Connell recognized and exploited completely. He was not
the accomodationist like the gentleman Reverend Williams; he didn't have to be.
The Irish Catholic was in the majority now. O'Connell's governing ideology was
made perfectly clear on October 28,1908 at the celebration of the centennial of
the founding of the Catholic diocese of Boston. Standing at the pulpit in the
Cathedral of the Holly Cross, a building far bigger than City Hall and taller
than the State House, O'Connell declared the new order in carefully chosen
words." The Puritan has passed, the Catholic remains. The Child of the immigrant
is called to fill the place which the Puritan has left." To the sons of the
Puritans of Boston 1915 the message should have been crystal clear, "The
Catholic is here. You must deal with him on his terms." Clearly inferred was
the deeper message, "The Irish are here." After a century of discrimination
against Irish Catholics at the hands of Protestants, O'Connell would have very
little to do in cooperating with them unless it was on his terms; on terms
suitable to Catholics. He demonstrated this time and again as he ran the
Archdiocese with a strong hand until his death in 1944.

The Jewish merchant, Edward Filene, himself no stranger to ethnic and religious
discrimination, believed in the cooperative spirit of Boston 1915 and he was
determined to reach out and include the Catholic Church. He was also pragmatic:
Irish Catholics were now a majority political bloc and they listened to the
Archbishop. The success of Boston 1915 depended on a broad base of public
support.

On December 3, 1909, Filene wrote to Archbishop O'Connell that the Exposition
highlighted the serious need for better housing. In this letter, Filene set the
groundwork for Woodbourne. "Among such problems [ facing the City ]." he wrote,
"that of housing seems to be the most serious and pressing. Promiscuous crowding
under depressing conditions of those least well armed to resist evil creates a
moral issue difficult to deal with. Getting together the religious institutions
for us [ that is the Boston 1915 movement, ed. ] would be desirable for dealing
with the housing problem. I think it practically and reasonably possible that as
much as $200,000 can be raised as a beginning for better housing. With that sum,
new cooperative housing plans can be drawn up."

The Archbishop replied promptly on December 5, 1909 that he would participate on
his terms." The plan you propose for the betterment of housing of the poorer
people of Boston appeals to me very strongly. If I am to go into this movement
personally it must be that I shall be at the head of it, for reasons you must
understand."

The record does not explain those reasons but it was clearly a test to see how
far the business investors - willing to put up $200,000 - were willing to go
for the Archbishop's prestige and participation. Apparently, they would not go
that far, even to prove that the venture was in the spirit of reform and the
public good. But Filene kept trying. "The glory of the church," he wrote
Archbishop O'Connell on January 20, 1910, "has always been in her curative and
redemptive work... bad morals are caused by overcrowding in tenement districts.
I am more than ever convinced that it lies in your power to inaugurate a work to
remedy those conditions. It is here that the churches undertake as a part of
their religious work the forming and carrying out of some plan by which the
people of Boston will have better housing."

When on November 1, 1911 the Boston Dwelling House Co. Directors signed the deed
of trust to create moderate income housing, Archbishop O'Connell's name was
among them. But in a letter to the BDHCo trustees from his private secretary
dated January 5, 1912, he made it clear on what terms he would participate: "the
Archbishop has lent his name to the Boston Dwelling House project... but will
not be able to attend any business outside his regular routine duties."

On November 15, 1913, the Archbishop resigned from the Board of Trustees stating
to Board President Henry Howard that "I have not been able to attend the
meetings nor give the matter the consideration and time it deserves." By then,
as will be seen, the Boston 1915 Movement had ended.

III.

With or without Archbishop O'Connell (who was elevated to Cardinal in 1911),
Boston 1915 steamed ahead. In May, 1910, New Boston first appeared. It
was the self described "official organ of Boston 1915. A monthly record of
progress in developing a greater and finer city."

New Boston ran until the end of 1911. Each issue had articles on a wide
variety of social issues, some of which are still relevant today. These topics
written by experts in the field ranged from housing and transportation to a
spirited campaign to "Save the Fourth" designed to ban dangerous fireworks.
Articles such as the improvements to the Charles River basin, wholesome milk,
the evils of billboards, the character of moving pictures, Boston's garbage
problem," public spirit and the tramp", schoolhouses as neighborhood centers,
making wife desertion unpopular, "Americanizing our immigrant children" and
"Five essential ways the automobile has added to the wealth of the city" show
the very broad range of concerns the Boston 1915 movement enveloped.

The Boston 1915 Directorate was divided into committees. One of the most
important was the Housing Committee which first met on February 28, 1910. It was
made up of Philip Cabot, E.T. Hartman, Meyer Bloomfield, Matthew Hale (City
Councilor from 1910 to 1912), Charles Logue, J Randolph Coolidge Jr., Richards
Bradley, Warren Manning (a partner in the Olmsted firm), Henry G. Dunderdale,
the architect William D. Austin (who designed the Jamaica Pond boathouse and
bandstand in 1910) and the playground advocate and educator Joseph Lee.

Their report, The Boston House Problem, was printed in the first issue of New
Boston and focused on the conditions of dwellings in the North End, West End,
Charlestown and South Boston.

The goal of the Housing Committee was to improve the overcrowding and sanitary
conditions of the existing housing in these districts. No new Woodbourne-type
subdivision was proposed for the North End. "Boston 1915." the report
recommended," will organize a bureau whose duty it shall be to investigate
housing complaints registered from any portion of the city." In 1911 Boston
1915 supported a bill introduced by Mayor Fitzgerald that proposed to revise
the current housing codes to apply to wooden 3 family houses. Boston 1915
proposed regulating what was understood by both business and government to be
private sector role. It was still the business of businessmen to provide
housing.

Slum clearance would come 25 years later when the Federal government made
housing a public priority in the face of the fact that the private sector could
not provide it. The Boston Housing Authority was created in 1935 to provide with
Federal funds housing for the wage earner.

The January 1911 issue of New Boston ran a story written by Frederick Law
Olmsted Jr. which illustrated the design goals of housing beyond the central
city districts that would be the model for Woodbourne. This was Forest Hills
Gardens in the borough of Queens New York financed by the Russell Sage
Foundation and planned and landscaped by the junior Olmsted. The story was
appropriately titled "A suburban town built on business principles." The
tenement districts could only be ameliorated with improved and enforced building
and sanitary codes together with better public health services. The objective of
the Boston 1915 Housing Committee was that these overcrowded unplanned
residential districts should not spread out along the newly opened rapid transit
lines linking the downtown core with the suburbs of Roxbury, Dorchester and
Jamaica Plain. The planned suburban development would be built there and Olmsted
Junior's article on Forest Hills Gardens was held up as the ideal for those
suburbs.

The second Boston 1915 Exposition had housing as its main theme. It was held
over the week of November 10 to 22, 1910 at Tremont Temple and the Boston Arena
. More of a conference than an exposition, the event was called "The Civic
Advance Campaign". The highlight was a dramatic pageant at the (recently
opened) Boston Arena on St Botolph Street titled "From Cave Life to City Life."
The intention of the program was to draw public attention to the problem of city
building designed to show the development of homemaking. It was held on Thursday
through Saturday, November 10 through 12, and had sections reenacting cave
dwellers, the Indian village, the Colonial town and the bustling 19th Century
city. The Civic Advance Campaign opened with "Mayor's Night" at Tremont Temple
with Mayor Fitzgerald as the keynote speaker. The November 1911 issue of New
Boston exclaimed that the fundamental meaning behind Boston 1915 and its
second exposition "is to help create [a] state of mind. There is no reason why a
municipality cannot be planned and made beautiful except through indifference
and bad habits. [The city's] affairs should be conducted economically and in
strict business principles, properly planned, decently ordered and economically
administered." To achieve this, "its citizens have to get into a state of mind."

The Tremont Temple conference outlined what would occupy the Boston 1915
Directorate in the coming year: it would write, influence and advocate a
legislative agenda that would push forward by force of law the state of mind
desired by the reformers.

Fifteen bills relative to police, education, housing codes, public health and
city planning which the Directorate had approved for action were reviewed in the
March 1911 issue of New Boston.

These comprised the 1911 Program for the Boston 1915 Directorate; some of which
are still relevant 88 years later:

Establish a proper public authority to plan and provide for comprehensive development of the city.

Federate cities and towns into one metropolitan district.

Organize larger uses of schoolhouses.

Create a civic center.

Establish more convenience stations and drinking fountains.

Better sidewalks ("to provide for 10 miles of paved sidewalk every year for 10 years.").

The most important Project of the 1911 Program for Boston 1915 was the first
bill, House Number 1109," To improve the conditions of the metropolitan
district. "The bill was "designed to provide Boston and the metropolitan
district with a city plan developed on sound moral, industrial and social
lines." It would create a 3 member commission which "would study and make
planning recommendations for better homes, structural and sanitary safety of
buildings, prevention of congestion and fire hazards and provide for
reservations of land for public use."

Boston 1915 put all of its great prestige and energy behind passage of the bill
which was largely the work of the Boston Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber's 1911
Report," Real Boston: The Get Together Spirit Among Cities and Towns" stated the
case to the legislature, the public and the press of the metropolitan district.
Boston was actually part of a city made up of 40 cities and towns stretching
from Salem to Cohasset and west to Framingham. The Chamber and the Directorate
of Boston 1915 introduced the "Real Boston" bill that would create the
Federation of Metropolitan Boston. In the April, 1911 New Boston, March G.
Bennett, Chair of the Real Boston Committee wrote what a Federation could do
for Metropolitan Boston, he argued that a federation already exists in sewer,
water supply and parks. In language predicting the rise decades later of the
Mass. Turnpike Authority, MassPort and the MBTA, he stated that cooperative
action would be valuable for transportation facilities, industrial education,
factory development, dock facilities, industrial railways, direct highways and
uniform building laws.

The Chamber staffed the 10 person Real Boston Committee made up of men from
Boston (the chair) Brookline, Newton, Cambridge, Malden, Lexington and
Somerville. This committee included Boston Dwelling House trustee Robert Woods
and the influential journalist Sylvester Baxter, Baxter was a major champion of
the Metropolitan Park Commission (today the MDC), one of the first metropolitan
governing agencies established in the Commonwealth. He was an ardent advocate of
metropolitan planning and government.

The Directorate of Boston 1915 staked all their considerable influence and
collective reputations on the passage of this legislation. The bill failed to
pass out of committee in April, 1910 and a different bill was filed again in
May. It was strongly supported by Governor Eugene Foss who sent a message to the
Legislature in April, 1912 urging passage of the legislation. But it was
defeated in the Metropolitan Affairs Committee later in the month. It was a
mortal wound for the reformers. The heart and soul of Boston 1915 was that only
through rational city planning could the 20th Century city be realized. The
Chamber and its allies in Boston 1915 stated that a plan for the City of Boston
Plan could not be made and implemented without full cooperation of the
surrounding cities and towns. City planning on a large and comprehensive scale
would harmonize the physical city and reduce conflicts of purposes and waste of
resources.

When this goal disintegrated with the defeat of the "Real Boston" bill, the
reformers lost energy and Boston 1915 collapsed within a year. The business
reformers failed to understand the dread of annexation in the hearts of the
cities and towns on the borders of Boston. Try as they might, the Real Boston
Committee and their legislative allies could not overcome the fear that if
cooperation began today, annexation would follow tomorrow.(Writing at the end
of his term, Mayor Fitzgerald stated that the Boston 1915 Movement was "a more
altruistic and ambitious scheme than ever was undertaken in any American city.
Although it has ceased as a tangible movement, its stimulus should be included
in a list of causes for Boston's progress during this period of four years.")

Mayor Fitzgerald was a strong believer in the legislation. His speech before the
1910 Civic Advance conference was about the need for municipal planning. When
the bill failed to pass, he blamed the towns of Newton and Brookline for their
shortsightedness. But then he knew only too well that the ethnic immigrant power
which he represented was the primary reason the suburbs rejected the Federation
of Metropolitan Boston in the first place: they wanted no part of Boston's
tribal politics. (In that same legislative session also came, in the words of
the Boston Herald, "the annual attack on the Boston Charter by the
Democratic machine", Senator Martin Lomasney, ward boss of the West End,
proposed a bill providing for a City Council of 28 members.)

But Boston 1915 was victorious because it brought city planning to Boston. In
1911, the Commonwealth created the Homestead Commission to develop a long
range, comprehensive housing program that included site planning and housing
design, of which Woodbourne was an early example. The 1913 Report of the
Commission contained language very similar to that of the Boston Dwelling House
Company proposal two years earlier : all families deserved a wholesome home and
only by conscious design, direction and supervision within a planned development
could the working man have the housing he needed for his family. The Commission
recommended that each city and town over 10,00 people be required to have
planning boards. After the defeat of the "Real Boston" bill, Mayor Fitzgerald
petitioned the General Court to authorize the City to establish the Boston
Planning Board, which was approved on January 27,1914.

Discouraged by their legislative defeat and tired of all the parochial politics,
the tattered remains of the Boston 1915 Directorate could take no pleasure in
the establishment of the Boston Planning Board because in January of 1914, James
M. Curley began his first term as Mayor of Boston.

Although a very popular mayor at the end of 1913, with strong support from
reformers, the business community and the ward leaders, Fitzgerald at first
declined to run for reelection. He planned instead to campaign for the United
Sates Senate against Henry Cabot Lodge in 1916.

After Curley announced his candidacy for mayor, both the ward leaders (for whom
Curley never had any regard) and the reformers prevailed on Fitzgerald to run
for a second term to keep Curley from winning. But Fitzgerald's campaign was
crushed and he resigned from the race in December, 1914 amid allegations
(gleefully exploited by Curley) of an affair with a cigarette girl and cabaret
singer, Toodles Ryan.

Mayor John F. Fitzgerald built an administration of cooperation between the
public and private sectors. Reformers could work in that municipal atmosphere.
Curley, on the other hand, thrived on conflict and the war he waged over the
next thirty years between Yankee and Irish, business and politics was not a
place in which business leaders or reformers could flourish. Moreover the parks
and beaches, schools and hospitals which Curley built during four terms as mayor
and for which he is fondly remembered even to this day, were built on the ever
increasing property taxes which had to be paid by business and property owners.
("The Republicans of our glorious Commonwealth," wrote Curley in his 1957
memoirs," should admit that improvements which advance the health, happiness and
welfare of all people cost money. Is a low city debt and low tax rate the price
we must pay for human suffering?")

But the happiness and welfare of James Michael Curley and his associates came
first. These improvements were vastly over budgeted because of political
corruption. Contractors who wanted lucrative city public works projects had to
pay the mayor first. Nothing symbolized this better than the construction of
Mayor Curley's grand mansion on the Jamaicaway during his first year in office.,
So scandalous was the open graft, that in 1915 business leaders forced a recall
election (as authorized by the 1909 charter) that Curley barely survived. But
survive he did. Amidst all this turmoil, the business community simply
retreated for forty years. They would not reemerge until the middle 1950's
during the more benign administration of Mayor John B. Hynes. But the optimism
had vanished then: Boston was in dire fiscal straights and Hynes needed all the
help he could get. (Running against Curley in 1949, Hynes' campaign slogan was
"The New Boston.")

IV.

Politics and planning have always been linked but never mix well. This was
especially true during the thirty years of Curley's rule over Boston government
(he was Mayor from 1914 to 1917; 1922 to 1925; 1930 to 1933; Governor from 1934
to 1936; and Mayor again from 1946 to 1949). These years of conflict within
Boston's political life dashed the spirit of optimistic reform that created and
motivated the Boston 1915 Movement and gave birth to the Boston Dwelling House
Company.

The reform spirit which originally guided the efforts of BDH Co was gone when
construction resumed on the second phase of Woodbourne coincidentally with the
start of Curley's second term as mayor. (He replaced the choice of the business
community, Andrew J. Peters, son of the owner of the Hosford and William's
subdivision adjacent to the Minot estate).

The second phase was dramatically different from the first two years of
construction not only in architectural styles but in ideology. In the first
phase the architecture fit the ideology. The architectural style of the second
phase changed because the reform spirit was replaced by profit and nostalgia.

The great optimism of the years before World War One in which reformers, such as
Boston 1915, sought to reshape American society along the lines of their own
material and social values, was replaced by pessimism fed by the disillusion of
the messy peace which concluded the War to End all War. Moreover, the change
from war to peace was sudden and violent. The years 1919 through early 1921 were
marked by labor troubles (the great steel and coal strikes and the walkout of
Boston Policemen in 1919); the severe recession that struck in October of 1919
which left 5 million men jobless in 1920; and the emergence for the first time
in American culture and politics of anti - communism in the wake of the
Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. (The American Communist Party was formed
in 1919.)

With the return of Republican control of the White House in 1920 with Presidents
Warren Harding and after his death in office, Calvin Coolidge, federal policies
were introduced which greatly increased prosperity. The revolt of the 1920's
was that against the reform ethos of President Woodrow Wilson which was crushed
beneath the wave of the new profit culture and the dawning of the consumer era
ushered in by Harding and Coolidge. The will for collective action against
society's ills lessened with the prosperous Roaring Twenties. American business
life looked very good indeed. There was nothing to reform. Moreover a new cult
of individualism was growing too. Moral and ethical improvement, the ideology of
the Boston Dwelling House Company, was replaced by the right of the individual
to profit and enjoy himself. Consequently, the tribal property of the 1912 Pope
plan for Woodbourne was hopelessly out of date by 1920 and thus not duplicated
in the second phase of its development. In the words of the cynic H. L.
Menckin, "Doing good [was] in bad taste."

Massachusetts was also swept up in 1920 with the historical nostalgia of the
300th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. The building
styles of the 17th Century were rediscovered by architects and the Colonial
Revival style - the gambrel roof and especially the 17th Century saltbox
house - was in high vogue in the second phase of Woodbourne. Nostalgia replaced
reform after 1922. It also fit the nationalism of the day. America was big and
strong after the War. Colonial Revival was a pure American style. Forget the
fact that British colonists brought it over to New England in the first place;
it did not look imported such as the Kilham and Hopkins Arts and Crafts designs
imported from England for the first phase of Woodbourne.

But more than anything else, it was a different world for the investors of the
Boston Dwelling House Company in 1920. Reform and business did not mix. The
business of Boston real estate was business not housing reform.